Research G00231127
11 June 2012
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
Software
D. Russell, A. Dayley, S. Childs, P. Rinnen
Backup is among the oldest, most performed tasks in the data center, but
enhancements and alternatives are becoming available. The industry is
undergoing significant change as organizations embrace new technologies
and show a propensity to augment or switch legacy vendors and backup
techniques.
Strategic Planning Assumption(s)
By 2016, one-third of organizations will change backup vendors due to frustration over cost, complexity and/or capability.
By 2014, 80% of the industry will choose disk-based appliances and backup software-only solutions over distributed virtual tape libraries (VTLs) versus just under half of the market in 2012.
By 2015, at least 25% of large enterprises will have given up on conventional backup/recovery software, and will employ snapshot and replication techniques instead.
By the end of 2016, at least 45% of large enterprises, up from 22% at year-end 2011, will have eliminated tape for operational recovery.
Market Definition/Description
The emphasis of this Magic Quadrant research is on backup and recovery software (i.e., backup applications). For vendors that meet the inclusion criteria (weighted heavily toward backup application software capabilities), we evaluated their entire backup/recovery software and hardware portfolio. However, hardware solutions and partner products were given a lower weighting in an attempt to focus on the backup/recovery software. A vendor profile in this research is not entirely product-specific, but rather represents the vendor’s overall position in the enterprise backup/recovery software market. Although Gartner believes that the appliance packaging option is often attractive for storage, particularly for backup use cases, this research is not focused on backup appliances (see “Are Storage Appliances in Your Future?”).
The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software presents the next step in the evolution of backup, which incorporates new products, solutions and techniques for protecting, backing up and recovering desktop, laptop, physical server and virtual server files, applications and system images. These backup products provide features such as traditional backup to tape, backup to conventional disk, data reduction (compression and
Organizations are increasingly making their backup product selection from vendors that offer expanded protection capabilities and techniques, in addition to traditional tape-based backup software. Many
organizations understand the value of backing up critical data via multiple methods. Many of these vendors would have been considered nontraditional suppliers of recovery solutions only a few years ago.
Gartner has responded to the changing enterprise backup/recovery landscape with a more comprehensive evaluation tool that better reflects the current and evolving state of the market. While the origins of this Magic Quadrant are in tape-based backup application software, we also consider vendors that possess backup applications and potentially a complimentary backup/recovery hardware portfolio. A vendor no longer must possess tape capabilities to be included. However, vendors that do not possess a broad-based and heterogeneous backup application (e.g., a Windows-only or a virtual machine [VM]-only solution) and that only deliver disk-based backup appliances were not eligible for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant.
Methodology
Placement on the Magic Quadrant is heavily influenced by more than 1,000 conversations conducted annually with Gartner clients on the topic of backup and recovery. In addition, the Magic Quadrant methodology includes a comprehensive vendor survey (typically resulting in a 20- to 80-page response), several in-depth vendor briefings regarding product, portfolio, strategy and messaging, and the solicitation of three or more references from each vendor for interviews, and up to seven references for electronic surveys. Gartner also utilizes worldwide end-user surveys, Gartner conference kiosk surveys, Gartner conference session polling data and many one-on-one conversations and backup roundtable discussions from these conferences. From these and other data sources, we learn how customers are using the vendor’s solutions, how prospects could potentially benefit from them, and the strengths and cautions of the offering from each provider. We learn about experiences with sales and support, acquisition and maintenance pricing, and their opinions on vendor responsiveness to aspects such as requests for enhancements.
It is important to remember that the Magic Quadrant does not solely rate product(s) quality or capabilities and features. A Magic Quadrant is not just about a vendor’s product(s); it is a scenario chart that maps a vendor’s overall position in a specific market. While the product portfolio is an important part of the rating, the vendor’s ability to acquire customers and expand its presence in the market is also important, as is its ability to grow product and service revenue. A vendor that offers a strong, technically elegant product, but is unable or unwilling to invest in marketing and sales to increase revenue and improve profitability, will find itself unable to invest in future development.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software
Source: Gartner (June 2012)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Acronis
Acronis’ primary use case in enterprises is still mainly as an imaging tool and for bare-metal recovery and server virtualization protection; however, more organizations are implementing Acronis Backup & Recovery for end-to-end data protection. The company has largely focused on Internet sales, resellers and OEM deals. Storage administrator downloads have resulted in larger enterprise deals, which have helped fuel the company’s fast growth over the last several years. Acronis also has solutions for disk monitoring and security. Acronis introduced vmProtect in August 2011 to compete against specialty VM backup products, such as Veeam and vRanger from Quest Software. vmProtect 7 introduced granular Exchange 2010 restore through agentless, single-pass backup, vCenter integration and bare-metal restore for ESXi. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 offers agentless backup for VMware and Hyper-V environments. Acronis Backup & Recovery offers client- and target-side deduplication.
Acronis introduced a hosted cloud backup offering in 2010, with adoption being somewhat muted — in line with most other cloud backup vendors. Today, the company offers on-premises, appliance and/or cloud backup capabilities — all from a single interface. Acronis’ vision is to continue rounding out its virtualization and cloud strategies, while adding more granular support for SQL Server, Active Directory and SharePoint. Gartner believes that Acronis will focus on moving deeper into the large enterprise in the near future, leveraging its ease-of-use and server virtualization capabilities to gain more customers, while expanding its
challengers leaders
niche players visionaries completeness of vision ability to execute As of June 2012 CommVault EMC Symantec IBM NetApp Autonomy, an HP Company CA Technologies Asigra Quest Software Evault, a Seagate Company
Acronis FalconStor Software
Strengths
Tightly integrated support for VMware environments is included as a vCenter plug-in and single-pass
backup for Exchange. It is the only vendor that can restore a VM to a heterogeneous hypervisor.
Ease of use continues to be cited by many customers.
Imaging and bare-metal recovery are robust and heavily used.
Cautions
Although more traction in the enterprise is occurring, most use cases are for imaging, and departmental or branch-office protection.
Acronis currently lacks granular restore for SQL Server and SharePoint.
Support may not be as timely as possible, as Acronis handles approximately a third of inquiries through phone, a third through chat and a third through email.
Asigra
Asigra has been providing multitenant backup and recovery solutions designed for managed service providers (MSPs) since its inception 26 years ago, and currently has 575 partners that offer it as their own relabeled software as a service (SaaS) solution. Also, customers have purchased the product for use as an on-premises private backup cloud. Asigra claims that more than 550,000 global sites are protected. Initially designed as a remote service, the product has a long history of incorporating data reduction technology. As such, Asigra was one of the first backup solutions to deliver block-level incremental processing whereby only new and changed blocks of data need to be transmitted.
The agentless architecture is a key feature of Asigra Cloud Backup software. DS-Clients support remote and branch offices, desktops, virtual environments, and now laptops and tablets by aggregating data to DS-System servers. The majority of customers back up to a backup service provider; however, an increasing number of organizations are implementing Asigra as a private cloud architecture. The product is mature, with broad functionality and robust customizable reporting that is the result of many years of customer feedback. Asigra was one of the first solutions to offer incremental, forever-backup processing. Asigra is quick to respond to market trends. Notable is its support for CDP, virtual environments and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification, NetApp snapshot integration and endpoint backup capabilities. Asigra supports snapshot and replication management for arrays built on Symantec Storage Foundation.
Asigra started supporting virtual environments years before some of the other backup software providers. At the time, there were no backup APIs available from server virtualization vendors, so Asigra used the native APIs from VMware, Hyper-V and Xen to provide support for VMs. Today, Asigra supports VMware through the vStorage APIs for Data Protection, as well as through native APIs. Asigra states that the native API method allows for greater granularity to the file/message level, although currently this requires a two-pass backup.
Asigra is not a household name to enterprise backup and IT staff, but is well-known in the MSP community. The focus on new feature delivery, a scalable grid architecture and its secure agentless implementation have allowed Asigra to garner new end-user, OEM and MSP customers, but overall company awareness remains low in the enterprise. Asigra intends to expand it snapshot support, large application capabilities and offer disaster recovery solutions based off server virtualization and remote copies of data.
Strengths
Low-touch, agentless architecture is available in physical and virtual environments.
Streamlined grid-based backup is offered for cloud architecture and infrastructure.
The Backup Lifecycle Management (BLM) concept provides four tiers of backup as data ages over time, with optional deletion and certificate-of-data destruction.
Cautions
The outdated administrative interface can be complex to manage, including lack of centralized
adminis-tration.
Exchange requires a two-pass backup operation for granular and full-restore operations, elongating
recovery times.
Limited native tape integration is offered for long-term retention (however, Asigra does support ingestion of data using the Microsoft Tape Format [MTF]).
Autonomy, an HP Company
Autonomy is a new entrant to this Magic Quadrant, replacing HP and Iron Mountain. In the first half of 2011, Autonomy acquired Iron Mountain’s digital assets, including its data protection business consisting of LiveVault and Connected cloud-based backup solutions. In October 2011, HP acquired Autonomy for over $10 billion. HP subsequently established “Autonomy, an HP Company” focused on information management, and including HP’s legacy Data Protector backup and recovery solutions along with Autonomy’s LiveVault and Connected.
Data Protector has historically offered solid feature functionality, and continues to do so. Features such as incremental forever, synthetic full and virtual full backups have reduced the number of backup points that had to be maintained. In 1997, HP delivered snapshot integration and automation via its Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery capabilities, which support HP, EMC and NetApp storage array snapshot and replication. In 2010, HP rebranded its internal portable deduplication engine as StoreOnce, and announced a series of new disk-based appliances based on the technology. StoreOnce is now offered as part of Data Protector 7 for client- and server-side deduplication, as well as for what the company calls “Catalyst-based replication,” an API that enables Data Protector to control movement of deduplicated data across the enterprise without the need for rehydration. Data Protector provides granular backup and recovery across a wide variety of applications, and with VMware via its Granular Recovery Extension. Connected is a market share leader in cloud-based endpoint protection with more than 3 million endpoints protected today. LiveVault provides midsize organizations and remote offices/branch offices (ROBOs) with WAN-optimized, deduplicated backup to the Autonomy cloud.
Autonomy bases most of its products on its Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), a common information platform for structured and unstructured information that provides conceptual understanding of information. IDOL has been integrated with LiveVault and Connected, and Autonomy intends to tightly integrate it with Data Protector as well. Autonomy’s cloud services, measured at 50PB in April 2012, are attractive to HP as a proof point for its cloud technologies; customers can expect to see more support for Data Protector as a cloud service. With its Data Protector 7 release, Autonomy integrated this global cloud capability for secondary off-site storage. Customers can expect to see more support for Data Protector as a cloud service. Over the past few years, HP has had trouble fully exploiting the HP brand name, route to market or server attach potential for Data Protector, despite a loyal customer base and broad set of partners worldwide. The acquisition of Autonomy could offer HP backup customers the benefits of additional investment in development and marketing across the overall backup portfolio. The Autonomy team is working on joint development and go-to-market activities across a number of HP business units, with integration ranging from the discovery and compliance to the storage hardware-focused groups. Gartner expects additional integration options to unfold in 2012. The joint StoreOnce and Catalyst announcement by Autonomy and HP Storage is evidence of the tangible collaboration under way postacquisition.
While the Autonomy acquisition closed in the beginning of 4Q11, product integration, updated marketing and sales activities are still unfolding. Getting a storage buyer to appreciate the IDOL investment and features could prove to be a challenge with the new organization; if successful, Autonomy will likely circumvent traditional storage buying centers. Autonomy sees a future where backup is under, or with, other data services.
Strengths
Data Protector provides solid functionality, including Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery for
snapshot management of HP, EMC and NetApp storage arrays, Granular Recovery Extension single-item recovery for SharePoint, Exchange and VMware, and federated deduplication with its StoreOnce technology.
Autonomy has extensive experience providing cloud services, including data protection, in a secure
cloud across multiple geographies.
The products are available globally from a wide variety of HP partners, and are often aggressively priced
relative to other solutions.
Cautions
Some clients express frustration with the amount of time it takes to get beyond first-level support, and would like to see improvements in this process, which is often an issue in the overall Autonomy portfolio.
The Autonomy information management vision is appealing to higher-level business buyers; however,
the company will be challenged to translate values and benefit statements to traditional backup and re-covery buyers. Autonomy backup prospects should seek clarity from the company regarding continued investment in core data protection functionality.
Some customers cite usability and management for Data Protector and Connected as areas for im-provement.
CA Technologies
CA Technologies’ ARCserve Backup product enjoys good brand recognition and is especially strong in the small or midsize business (SMB) market. The company claims to have more than 100,000 customers, just over half of those with active maintenance (not an unusual percentage for the market to which CA typically sells). Over the past few years, CA has made a concerted effort to expand its focus on channel partners, and has developed new programs and pricing models for MSPs and cloud service providers.
The company launched ARCserve R16 in the second half of 2011, which further integrates CDP, replication and high-availability technology gained via its 2006 acquisition of XOsoft with the ARCserve Backup software. All modules are offered as part of the ARCserve brand. The portfolio offers ARCserve Backup, a traditional file, application and database backup that includes target-side deduplication at no cost; ARCserve D2D, offering block-level infinite incremental (“i2”) snapshot backup that provides full-system bare-metal restore; and ARCserve Replication and ARCserve High Availability, including CDP. ARCserve R16 offers enhanced cloud support. CA has partnered with a number of cloud infrastructure providers, as well as MSPs, to offer disaster recovery services in addition to backup to the cloud. ARCserve continues to be solid in the VMware environment. R16 introduced new Central Applications for doing host-based VMware backup, virtual conversion and standby of image-based backups and a management interface for managing and reporting on backup and disk-to-disk (D2D) environments. The free-of-charge software-based deduplication, strong VM support, solid network-attached storage (NAS) integration, included recovery dashboard and optional CDP and replication capability are among the features that customers highlight.
In 2011, the company revamped pricing to better support its worldwide two-tier distribution model. The product can be sold via a managed capacity option that includes all ARCserve components or via a service provider licensing option (month-to-month, inclusive of managed capacity and modules). A la carte and module (bundles) options are also available. CA recently aligned ARCserve with its growth market (midmarket) business unit, and combined the ARCserve and Nimsoft sales teams to focus on selling to midmarket
customers.
While marketing emphasis seems to wax and wane, the ARCserve backup/recovery portfolio has been improving in capabilities and features that outpace its penetration in the marketplace. Gartner believes that CA will attempt to expand its routes to market through new activities, such as additional integration with remote monitoring and management (RMM) vendors, deeper integration with Nimsoft and MSP support, further coupling backup, replication and high availability and new packaging options to better showcase its improved product technology.
Strengths
Administrators continue to report ease of setup and ongoing management as positive product
differen-tiators, and favorably rate the enhanced user interface (UI) and management capabilities of R16.
CA ARCserve offers a full range of data protection products, from bare-metal restore to fully automated
failover for high availability, predominately for the Windows and server virtualized environments.
The focus on its channel partners is strong, with functionality, support and pricing developed uniquely for
MSPs and cloud partners.
Cautions
The product has traditionally been deployed within SMBs. Therefore, awareness of ARCserve as a larger
enterprise-class solution continues to be a challenge for CA, despite improving product capabilities over the last several years and CA’s overall presence in large enterprises.
The channel partner distribution model that serves ARCserve so well means that the product continues to struggle to find its place in CA’s traditionally direct sales and go-to-market strategy.
Desktop/laptop protection was new in 2011. Adoption is still relatively low, and CA will face broad com-petition in this area.
CommVault
In the last six years, CommVault has been on a media blitz. It has become a mind share leader in the industry, marketing effectively and creating a perception of being a much larger vendor than it is. The company has shifted its emphasis on the midmarket to large enterprises, although it continues to sell into all markets, including the SMB segment via partners and resellers.
In version 9 of its Simpana software, CommVault has sustained its growth by adding many new functions and capabilities, along with a perceived edge in ease of use and fewer scripting requirements, compared with other enterprise backup solutions. The company has maintained a continued strong public presence in print and electronic advertising, and in social media.
Of all the backup vendors on this Magic Quadrant, CommVault has been the most vocal and articulate about the future of backup, shifting toward the exploitation and management of storage array and NAS replication and snapshots, seeking to serve as a manager of managers over a variety of backup and storage options from a central console. To support this vision, CommVault offers IntelliSnap (formerly known as SnapProtect) snapshot protection capability, which integrates with the industry’s broadest number of storage platform solutions to schedule and manage snapshots, offering robust application support and cataloging of individual files and objects. The company continues to invest in scalable and efficient data reduction, adding more-robust, client-side and a more global deduplication capability. Customers give what are perhaps the most favorable comments about the Simpana product, and also give the VM recovery capabilities high marks. In addition to a well-defined cloud backup strategy, Simpana 9 introduced External Data Connector for assisting in the migration from EMC NetWorker, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and Symantec NetBackup backup software to Simpana. CommVault has been the most vocal about the unification of backup and archive. It delivers a well-integrated platform that was built from the ground up on a common architecture. Gartner expects CommVault to keep pushing these strengths to broaden its data management capabilities, attempting to further leverage the copies of data that Simpana houses.
CommVault derives over 20% of its backup revenue from its relationship with Dell, and as the OEM for software to other companies, notably Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp. CommVault’s continued growth is likely to depend on the expansion and maturation of its large-enterprise sales force, and continued developments with resellers and partners outside the U.S. End-user feedback has been mainly positive as CommVault expands into increasingly larger opportunities, including Fortune 100 companies, international service providers and new OEM engagements. The perception within IT organizations that CommVault is a storage software company that continues to deliver innovations rapidly seems to be paying off for CommVault.
Strengths
CommVault offers the industry’s broadest support for integrating with and exploiting storage hardware platform replication and snapshots.
It has a mature source and target-side deduplication, with the industry’s only deduplication-to-tape
Broad support for server virtual environments includes granular backup/recovery from applications run-ning in a VM.
Cautions
Customers and references have mentioned the need for improved reporting and a high-level dashboard for monitoring a large number of backup jobs.
Quality of field support has received mixed reports, as the sales force in North America retools to go after larger enterprises.
Clients continue to report that deduplication performance depends on proper sizing, quantity of disk and server resources.
EMC
EMC has become a powerhouse in the data protection market through its long-standing acquisition strategy and corporate focus (up to the senior executive level) on this market as a growth opportunity. It offers numerous products for backup and recovery, replication, deduplication and management of data protection processes. Its backup and recovery division has been championing thought-leadership efforts focused on backup modernization and redesign. EMC has become very good not only at leveraging its large backup division’s sales team, but also at creating linkages and sales opportunities with the industry’s largest primary storage field sales force and the storage industry’s most vocal marketing machine. Increasing sales from partners drive more business than its direct sales.
EMC offers traditional software-based backup with NetWorker, obtained through the 2003 acquisition of Legato Systems. NetWorker is a mature offering built using an older client/server architecture. Avamar, acquired by EMC in 2006, is known for its source-side deduplication and is often sold as a prepackaged appliance, the Avamar Data Store. Avamar has been scaling up to address the requirements of larger data centers with its strong support for VMware, NAS, remote offices and desktops/laptops. Avamar’s VMware support with changed block tracking (CBT), from not only a backup, but also a recovery use case is unique in that it minimizes the amount of data to be moved for backup and restore operations.
EMC’s Avamar and NetWorker are the focus of this evaluation, but EMC offers Data Domain as a deduplicated backup target and the Disk Library for mainframes. Its Mozy product provides cloud-based backup services. EMC sells its backup portfolio (e.g., Avamar and Data Domain) to many cloud backup providers. Various levels of integration are provided among the products, with a short- and long-term road map for additional unification and commonality of components and management. Although all of EMC’s offerings are intended to be able to be deployed as stand-alone, there is overlapping functionality among the products.
Key to EMC’s continued success will be its ability to couple the products more tightly for those seeking complete solutions, broader and more heterogeneous support of snapshot and replication, and maintaining or even improving the level of customer support as its market penetration increases. Gartner does hear concerns regarding the length of time that tighter product integration, new features (e.g., Avamar tape support) and easier management of many instances of the products are taking; however, in May 2012, EMC refreshed Avamar and Data Domain, which delivered improvements in performance, scalability and continued levels of integration, along with Avamar tape support.
Strengths
Avamar provides strong support with compelling capabilities for VMware and Hyper-V, NAS, remote-office and laptop backup.
NetWorker is rejuvenated with code sharing of application and VMware support from Avamar, and
im-proved customer support, bringing updated capabilities to the large enterprise scalability that NetWorker offers.
Omnipresent marketing and sales — the storage industry’s largest internal sales force and Velocity part-ner program — can provide many customer-facing resources.
Cautions
Some customers have reported that the Avamar interface, once simple and easy to use, has become more complex and cumbersome.
EMC has been delivering points of architectural integration and common management in the portfolio, but a fully integrated design is not yet available for all of the software components and may take several years to unfold.
Customers and prospects have expressed concerns over Avamar pricing, especially at scale, although EMC reduced prices for Avamar in the first quarter of 2012.
EVault, a Seagate Company
In the previous version of this Magic Quadrant the company was profiled as i365, but in late 2011 the company name was changed back to EVault, a Seagate Company to capitalize on brand recognition. EVault targets the midmarket, as well as large enterprise remote and branch offices with its on-premises, cloud, appliances, endpoint protection and managed services. Today, nearly half of EVault’s customers store data in one of its 12 secure data centers in the U.S., Europe and Canada. EVault claims to have over 35,000 customers for its on-premises solution and hosted service and through its many OEM partners.
The company is betting that the cloud will play a significant role in the future of data protection, and the functionality it delivers supports on-premises deployments, cloud services and a disk-to-disk-to-cloud hybrid model called cloud-connected backup and recovery. Numerous features enable efficient WAN utilization, including deduplication and compression of data at the source, with additional deduplication performed at the target. The product includes a Quick File Scanning (QFS) capability that identifies changed files using hash values and position indicators, and what it calls “adaptive compression,” which allows for dynamic adjustment of compression algorithms based on compressibility of the data, the relative availability of CPU and bandwidth. The company also offers bare-metal restore, CDP and replication, as well as an EVault Cloud Disaster Recovery Service that provides guided recovery and access to systems and data in remote/ virtualized environments with guaranteed SLAs of four, 24 and 48 hours, depending on the service level. Support for vStorage APIs for Data Protection was added in 2011, as was support for endpoint protection (EVault Endpoint Protection) through an OEM partnership with Datacastle.
EVault offers services that range from backup and recovery in Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements(SSAE) 16 compliant data centers, to physical transport services, recovery as a service, and disaster recovery planning, testing and cloud-readiness consultations. Sales and marketing programs are available as part of the EVault Partner Program, while the EVault Cloud-Connected Service Provider program
enables value-added resellers (VARs) and MSPs to offer cloud backup services backed by the EVault Cloud. EVault technology also powers the offerings of cloud services providers, data centers, telcos, independent software vendors (ISVs) and others alliance partners.
While EVault offers solid backup capabilities, competitors have been faster at delivering new functionality and improved interfaces, and have articulated a more comprehensive backup/recovery vision for the future. Features that are common in other solutions — such as advanced client management, updated console, object-level recovery within VMs and plug-in support for Exchange 2010 — are 2012 road map items. Gartner expects many current product feature limitations to be addressed.
Strengths
Cloud-connected offerings that deliver a combination of on-premises, hybrid and secure data
manage-ment in the cloud work well for the midmarket ROBO environmanage-ments.
The product is available in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia/Pacific via a large set of
VARs, MSPs and hosted service providers.
The new EVault Endpoint Protection product, offered on-premises or as a cloud service, provides data
protection and integrated security features like remote wipe, port access control and GPS tracking for laptops.
Cautions
The company is slow to add competitive functionality.
Some administrative challenges — users like the EVault Central Control feature, but cite the WebCentral
Control as an area for improvement.
EVault will be dependent on enterprise adoption of cloud services to realize its strategic vision of the
cloud as playing a large role in data protection and to acquire more enterprise customers.
FalconStor Software
FalconStor was founded in 2000. In 2003, the company delivered its VTL software, which went on to generate significant revenue, largely from OEM partners — notably EMC. Later, heterogeneous replication, CDP and software-based deduplication were added through its CDP and Network Storage Server products, which are the focus of FalconStor’s inclusion in this research.
During the last three years, the company began expanding into larger-enterprise sales, and replacing declining OEM revenue with sales of its non-VTL recovery solutions. OEM revenue accounted for just over half the company’s revenue in 2007, while it now represents less than 10%, as FalconStor transitions to being more of a supplier of recovery products, rather than as a component technology in other solutions. The company touts nearly 4,500 customers for all its products.
FalconStor is becoming better-known for its CDP, and its heterogeneous snapshot/replication capabilities for physical and virtual servers, compared with its VTL software. The company delivers these recovery solutions as installable software, a virtual appliance and as preconfigured hardware offerings. FalconStor has seen significant turnover, including in sales and at the executive levels. In the first half of 2011, the company announced a new product that would better integrate all recovery capabilities, and offer a more service-oriented management console, but this has yet to be delivered one year later; however, Gartner expects this
At times, customers have complained that FalconStor’s product packaging, feature description and overall external messaging are confusing. However, users often praise the amount of recovery capabilities and the ease of managing the solution. FalconStor offers broad application integration through a single agent, and an off-host VM snapshot function. FalconStor provides agentless backup for VMware environments. References noted the ability to replicate local disk along with storage area network (SAN) data within the same process, offloading backup from production servers, quiescing multiple systems (metadata and production data, if housed separately) and fast restore speeds as key product features.
FalconStor’s future focus will revolve around scalability by increasing the repository size, offering performance through enhanced deduplication and protection, and introducing an updated console and analytics in support of larger enterprise environments. If FalconStor can deliver on these capabilities, which include up leveling data protection to be more service-oriented, then awareness and expanded routes to market improvements will be key improvement needs.
Strengths
Flexible and broad recovery solutions, ranging from CDP, heterogeneous server-based snapshot and
replication to VTL capabilities, all offer data-reduction capabilities.
FalconStore uses application-aware snapshots for near-instant restores.
RecoverTrac feature streamlines testing and execution of recovery plans for local and remote data pro-tection.
Cautions
Continued turnover within the company’s management (high-level executives and North American sales) can mean that company and product vision take more time to realize.
Be aware of overall cohesiveness, integration and administration of the product. Product code is some-times released with quality concerns that are addressed postrelease; however, customers report that code quality improved in the last year and is a focus of the new management team.
Users have cited error reporting as being cryptic.
IBM
Historically, IBM TSM has been known for its pioneering use of technologies like the incremental forever model of backup processing, using a semirelational database for a catalog (TSM has since moved to DB2 as a catalog), and the application of a rich set of policy constructs in lieu of the more traditional job-based approach. While offering many compelling benefits, the perceived administrative challenge of managing the product remains an issue. While the industry has largely adopted a backup approach that is similar in nature, even after rewrites and much improvement, the perception is still that TSM is more challenging to manage than other large-enterprise solutions. For almost 15 years, the recovery portfolio was developed in-house. In late 2007, IBM acquired Arsenal Digital Solutions, which brought in software as a service (SaaS) backup. In 2008, IBM acquired FilesX, which provided software-based replication and CDP, and acquired Diligent for hardware-based deduplication and VTL capabilities. In 2011 and 2012, IBM has seen greater uptake with cloud and MSPs, as well as expanded SMB sales through partners.
While IBM has leveraged its large direct sales force, the portfolio generates the majority of its revenue from worldwide business partners. Customers cite the portfolio’s ability to scale to handle very large recovery requirements, and the vendor’s service and support receive the highest marks of any enterprise recovery product. However, the company often receives low to no credit for its recent technical accomplishments (such as the no-charge target-side and client-side deduplication and the new integrated, and also free of charge, Cognos reporting engine). The move to DB2 as the back-end database has resulted in even greater scale for a single TSM instance, as well as a smaller footprint for the TSM catalog. While initially late with robust VM support, the 2011 TSM for Virtual Environments is helping to address this gap. Gartner expects expanded VM functionality to be delivered in late 2012. New capacity-based licensing options have been much more favorably received than the cryptic Processor Value Unit (PVU) method; customers site this pricing model as allowing them to deploy greater backup capabilities.
While very scalable and robust, the TSM management console is daunting for some. However, IBM indicates that a new UI is planned for 2013. More so than other large-enterprise backup vendors, the administrative console and reporting engine seem to be in a constant state of redress as IBM seeks to counter the perception of TSM’s being more complex to manage. Given past issues in this area, customer skepticism remains regarding future success.
Strengths
A major market share player, IBM TSM offers midsize to large enterprise end-to-end recovery capabili-ties, from single machine to the largest enterprise to cloud and other managed services, in addition to dedicated recovery appliances (VTLs, preconfigured backup servers, etc.) and storage infrastructure.
It was the first to market with incremental forever backup processing and a broad set of no-charge data
reduction and reporting features.
Customers and references cite the portfolio’s scalability, code quality and strong support staff as major reasons for choosing, and remaining with, the solution.
Cautions
More complete server virtualization support and exploitation remains a future deliverable, despite 2011
enhancements.
In contrast to the rest of the large enterprise backup providers, IBM’s approach to snapshot and repli-cation remains largely IBM-centric, offering no native support for non-IBM platforms, such as EMC or NetApp.
TSM has delivered the ability to replicate data from one TSM server to another. Broader federated TSM
server management, TSM load balancing and availability options have yet to be provided, unlike some of the competition.
NetApp
NetApp is a provider of primary storage solutions, and is increasingly being used and considered for backup and recovery. NetApp is well-known in the industry for storage in general, but only in recent years has it become a major vendor in the pure-play backup market. Foundational to the company’s data protection strategy is the ability to take numerous, space-efficient snapshots without incurring a performance penalty and thus adversely affecting users or applications.
In 2003, NetApp delivered the V-Series of storage virtualization appliances, which extended its snapshot, replication and subsequent data reduction capabilities to third-party disk storage. Soon after, NetApp introduced a more traditional server-based backup product to capture data via block-level incremental snapshots from distributed systems servers and send it back to NetApp storage. Open Systems SnapVault (OSSV) claims a base of nearly 90,000 licenses. In 2005, the company began delivering application-specific management for snapshot and replication modules with its NetApp OnCommand SnapManager portfolio, which was early to offer application administrator-managed recovery capabilities, freeing up the backup and disk administrators. The company’s Protection Manager was delivered in 2007 to automate provisioning secondary storage, execute protection policies and manage the overall relationships among SnapMirror, SnapManager, SnapVault, OSSV and NetApp primary snapshot copies.
In mid-2011 NetApp entered into an OEM agreement with CommVault to offer backup capabilities with a solution called SnapProtect, which is licensed on a storage controller basis (as opposed to capacity-based licensing). SnapProtect is complemented by a partnership with Syncsort (see Syncsort) that dates back to 3Q10 and an increased relationship with Symantec, which will include a resell of NetBackup Replication Director in 1H12 (see Symantec), which started in 1Q12. NetApp contributed intellectual property to the CommVault, Symantec and Syncsort solutions.
In the last four years, Gartner clients have increasingly been evaluating NetApp as a backup platform provider. Interest in NetApp for backup became more pronounced at the beginning of 2007, when the company was early to market with a deduplication capability that became free of charge in 2008. To some, the combination of taking frequent application-aware snapshots that were easy to manage, and then storing them in a deduplicated and compressed state in place of licensing and managing traditional backup software and all its agents is appealing. NetApp’s block incremental replication D2D backup methodology includes deduplication and compression, and offers benefits over traditional file-level backup. Over the past several years, Gartner has noticed a small but growing minority of organizations claiming to have augmented or entirely replaced traditional backup with NetApp recovery solutions. NetApp is betting that the future backup mentality will resonate with the notion of backup being built into the storage platform — i.e., through limited intellectual offerings of its own, but mostly through a broad partner ecosystem, more customers will choose NetApp for primary and secondary (backup) storage. If this occurs, expect NetApp to push hard for SLA-oriented backup and recovery capabilities.
Strengths
Snapshot techniques do not require file system scans to detect new and changed data. Backups and
restores can be done rapidly, with the backup window being nearly eliminated.
Customers and references cite the portfolio’s ease of use and ability to manage many terabytes to
pet-abytes worth of recovery data with less staff as major reasons for investing in the solution.
The ability to delegate application and VM backup and recovery activities to application and backup
administrators to offload the storage team from being as directly involved with all backup provisioning operations is advantageous.
Cautions
NetApp’s OSSV software for capturing data that does not reside on NetApp storage offers broad file system coverage, but only SQL Server application support.
Full realization of the data protection benefits of NetApp’s recovery portfolio may require partner
solu-tions, such as those from CommVault (Simpana) or NetApp’s SnapProtect, Quest Software (NetVault), Symantec (NetBackup) or Syncsort (BEX) to extend the capabilities and supported environments.
NetApp’s diverse backup and overall data availability offerings include a wide range of NetApp solutions, as well as partner solutions. Some customers have reported that understanding which solution to use can be confusing.
Quest Software
In January 2011, Quest Software completed its acquisition of BakBone Software. This rounded out Quest’s portfolio of data protection products, which now includes the BakBone NetVault portfolio, vRanger (through the Vizioncore acquisition in 2008), LiteSpeed and Recovery Manager. Quest traditionally focused on database management, but broadened its portfolio to Windows and virtualization management, and to the data protection market. Quest focuses its efforts on six core business units, with the backup unit formally coming together in June 2011.
NetVault historically targeted the midmarket, looking to capture customers that needed more scale than Symantec’s Backup Exec or CA’s ARCserve can provide, as well as opportunistically selling to large enterprises, often with disruptively low pricing. More recently, there has been an emphasis on Teradata, Quest’s largest OEM, as well as an OEM deal with NEC. The NetVault side of Quest is focusing on broad server platform and application support, with a wide range of data protection solutions, including diverse platform support, and being quite strong in Linux environments and offering solid NetApp support.
Users have highlighted NetVault as being easy to use. Its CDP and deduplication technology have garnered positive feedback from a sampling of its customers. With Quest’s go-to-market channel model, NetVault should be able to better penetrate the midmarket, due to increased sales support, expanded business partner channels and additional development resources.
The vRanger product is targeted at VMware-specific backup use cases and provides one-pass backup and granular recovery for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory. It was an early entrant into the VM backup space. Although new competition gained traction in 2010 and 2011, Quest has been steadily updating vRanger’s feature set to address this. vRanger utilizes patented Active Block Mapping and VMware support to reduce the backup footprint; it also provides a fully integrated backup catalog, which offers full search capabilities, including advanced search criteria with a right-click recovery. LiteSpeed for SQL Server and LiteSpeed Engine for Oracle provide tight integration with databases and are often used in conjunction with another backup product, exploiting LiteSpeed’s ability to decrease backup size (utilizing its adaptive compression) and backup/restore times. Also, vRanger is agentless.
Quest continues to work on integrating its data protection portfolio, already delivering a common
deduplication engine across the products (LiteSpeed, NetVault and vRanger) and is in the demo stage of a unified backup and recovery console (NetVault Extended Architecture), which initially unites three of its backup solutions. Quest continues to build on deeper application support, leveraging CDP, and improving data protection SLAs.
Quest, a publicly traded company, recently announced a go-private transaction. As of the date of publication of this report, this transaction was still in process.
Strengths
Quest provides robust platform support, including Windows, Linux, Unix, Teradata and Apple Mac.
CDP data capture and fast recovery times leverage NetVault FastRecover.
Strong VM support includes one-pass backup and granular recovery capability for Exchange, Active
Directory and SharePoint.
Cautions
The administrative console for NetVault is aged and lacks integrated unified administration for the
vari-ous Quest backup products. The company says it plans to address both of these concerns with the forthcoming launch of the NetVault XA platform.
Several users have cited performance issues with upgrades for vRanger.
There is a lack of integrated support for array-based replication/snapshots outside of NetApp.
Symantec
Symantec’s major entrance into the backup/recovery market came with its announcement at the end of 2004 to acquire Veritas Software for $13.5 billion. Veritas brought to Symantec two main backup product lines: NetBackup and Backup Exec. Veritas had acquired Backup Exec in the Seagate Software merger in 1999, to add Windows support to the vendor’s dominant Unix position, represented by NetBackup. These product lines continue to be largely two different code bases targeted at two different audiences: NetBackup at the enterprise and Backup Exec at SMB and ROBO markets; however, in the last three years, there has been code sharing around deduplication, virtualization, OpenStorage (OST) and Windows application support. NetBackup and Backup Exec are market-share-leading solutions in the enterprise and midsize enterprise segments, respectively. NetBackup is the single largest revenue producing product in Symantec’s portfolio and in the overall backup software market. Symantec offers solid deduplication software, as well as a successful line of integrated backup and deduplication appliances. The Symantec OST interface allows integration with other backup solutions to be managed under one console, and to minimize data transfer. In 2011, Symantec introduced further cloud-based protection capabilities through Backup Exec.cloud and a cloud disaster recovery partnership with Doyenz, in addition to support for other cloud storage providers. With over 1,200 engineers working on its backup solutions, Symantec launched major upgrades in 2012 for Backup Exec (version 2012) and NetBackup (version 7.5) on the same day around the world. Symantec is having success with its capacity-based licensing schemes to address previous concerns over pricing and maintenance.
From 2009 and to early 2011, Gartner heard concerns from Symantec backup customers, particularly NetBackup organizations, about the company’s commitment to backup, confusion on road maps and maintenance pricing. Starting in 2010, but more fully realized in 2011, Symantec updated its pricing schemes, has again become very vocal in the backup market (as during its heritage Veritas days) and has
tightly coupled the engineering code sharing and the marketing efforts of its two flagship backup offerings. The result has been a much more favorable view of the company and a well-communicated set of product enhancements and futures. Notably among the new capabilities are NetBackup Accelerator for significantly reducing the backup window, as well as search and Simplified File Recovery for end-user restore and enhanced Granular Recovery Technology for single item recovery from applications running in a VM. New features, such as Replication Director, which manage array-based snapshots, initially offer limited data types and storage platform support. Gartner believes that the near-term road map for expanded storage array snapshot and replication support over the next year is solid. In the long term, Symantec is likely to try to unify backup, high availability and disaster recovery.
Strengths
The market share leader of large enterprise and SMB backup offers end-to-end recovery capabilities
from a single machine to the largest enterprise to cloud services via software-only and preconfigured appliances.
New NetBackup features — such as Backup Accelerator, Replication Director and enhancements to the Ops Center UI and deduplication algorithms — represent a return to greater development investment.
The new task-oriented UI and the broad VMware and Hyper-V file and application support are often
highlighted as being strong features in Backup Exec 2012.
Cautions
NetBackup customers have raised concerns over deduplication rehydration performance (expand-ing deduplicated data in order to write out to tape), as well as setup and configurations issues with the SharePoint agent.
The new Backup Exec 2012 administrative console is now server-centric versus being job-based, which may be challenging for longtime users to adjust to.
While Gartner has seen material improvement over the last year, the perception of NetBackup and Backup Exec 2012 customer support is highlighted as an issue by some customers.
Syncsort
Syncsort BEX is sold worldwide and, since 2010, exclusively through a set of distribution partners (Arrow and Avnet in North America and EMEA, both top NetApp partners) and value-added resellers, as the previous direct sales effort was decommissioned. Syncsort has implemented a strategy to enhance the value of its backup software by offering block-level incremental and application-aware extensions for NetApp’s storage array-based snapshots.
In September 2010, Syncsort and NetApp expanded their long-standing partnership to deliver NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB), which offers value-added extensions to NetApp’s core data protection technologies. NSB combines Syncsort software, NetApp Snapshot, clone and replication technology, deduplication and compression and NetApp disk storage into an integrated solution.
Syncsort offers a tiered recovery model, including file/object restore, volume/disk recovery (via snapshots), application recovery, bare-metal recovery and what it calls “Instant Virtualization.” Instant Virtualization provides the fast (typically 10 minutes or less, regardless of the amount of data) recovery of a backup
dataset as a VMware VM, which can quickly be used for production activity. After the restoration is complete, Syncsort’s software automates the Storage vMotion process to switch the running VM and the new clone. A longtime backup, window-reducing technology, fast and granular recovery options and ease of use are among the highlights that customers and prospects routinely mention.
Syncsort is focused on NSB. Customers on the legacy BEX software will likely be migrated to the new packaging model. NSB is offered as a midsize enterprise solution, and can be deployed by MSPs that service this market as well. Gartner is increasingly seeing the solution in enterprise accounts, particularly for VM, remote office and departmental backup. In early 2012, NSB was launched in the Asia/Pacific region with Distribution Central in hopes of attaining the same level of traction that the integrated solution has achieved in North America and Europe, where larger deal sizes and consideration in new accounts has resulted in over 400 new customers.
Syncsort’s ability to achieve traction in its new primary packaging option (NSB) and route-to-market (partner-only and NetApp) model will determine the company’s ability to reach a broader customer base with what seems to be innovative, market-resonating features. Gartner expects Syncsort to update its UI and further exploit its grid-based architecture to increase its penetration in lower-end and enterprise markets.
Strengths
Syncsort has the capability to provide fast and granular object, file or complete data center recovery
from a single backup image.
Solid server virtualization and NAS support are use cases where the solution offers compelling
capabili-ties.
A block-level incremental approach offers solid data reduction, which is further enhanced by NetApp’s
deduplication and compression features.
Cautions
Very little mind share for BEX and the stand-alone offering will give way to the integrated NSB solution.
Depending on customer implementation choices, recovery from tape can require a resource and time-intensive restore of an entire snapshot to disk, even if only a single object or file is desired.
Syncsort’s success in the backup market looks to be completely tied to NetApp, which has its own data protection capabilities and a number of other backup partnerships.
Vendors Added or Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.
Added
Quest Software, which acquired the previously included BakBone Software, was added to this Magic Quadrant.
Note that i365 changed its company name and is known as EVault, a Seagate Company; however, this does not represent an addition.
Autonomy, an HP company, is the new name for the company that includes the merger of Autonomy, HP and Iron Mountain.
Dropped
Three vendors have been dropped from this Magic Quadrant:
Atempo was acquired by ASG Software, which is expanding into archiving and retains the Atempo
backup products. Evidence of active market expansion was not met in 2012.
BakBone Software was acquired by Quest Software and its backup/recovery software assets are now consolidated into the Quest evaluation.
In 2011, Iron Mountain’s digital assets were acquired by Autonomy. In late 2011, Autonomy was ac-quired by HP. All three companies’ backup/recovery software capabilities are represented by the name Autonomy, an HP Company.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
The focus of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software is on disk-based capabilities. We used a different set of inclusion criteria. We know that some readers may compare the two research documents. As such, we wish to emphasize two important differences in criteria:
To be eligible for this year’s Magic Quadrant, a vendor must be able to capture data and not deliver only
a disk target. This change in criterion was done to exclude vendors that only deliver a VTL and other disk-based backup appliances and do not possess a backup software application. If a vendor meets all the criteria and also delivers a hardware-based solution, such as a VTL and/or a disk-based backup ap-pliance, then that is factored into the evaluation of its overall recovery portfolio.
In the retired MarketScope, there were requirements to support physical tape. While supporting physical tape is a valuable capability, tape support is not a requirement for this Magic Quadrant; however, tape support positively affects the vendor’s evaluation.
In an attempt to ensure that the most market-relevant solutions are covered in this Magic Quadrant, the following criteria needed to be met at the time of our initial research and survey work:
1 Vendor’s portfolio must be able to capture data directly and not rely solely on a third party and/or partner capabilities for data capture/ingestion. The vendor must possess heterogeneous backup software capabilities.
2 The vendor must possess some form of a backup catalog to track the protected (backed up) data and potentially the many resulting copies of that data.
3 The solution must support files and multiple applications on Windows, and either Linux or one or more Unix OS (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) in physical and virtual deployments.
4 Solution(s) must natively support writing data to disk targets, and optionally support writing to a physical tape destination.
5 Solution(s) must be available for purchase as an on-premises owned/licensed program product and not only as a service.
6 The vendor must achieve more than $30 million in annual new license and maintenance revenue. 7 The company should have a growing installed base of customers and be actively expanding in the
enterprise backup/recovery market.
8 The vendor must have disk-based backup/recovery solution commercially available and have at least 10 active references using the solution in a production scenario to protect heterogeneous systems (Windows, and either Linux or one or more Unix OS) in a physical and a server virtualized environment. 9 The vendor must actively market its branded backup/recovery products in at least two major regions (for
example, North America, EMEA, or Japan and Asia/Pacific).
10 The provider must be the originator of the required capabilities and meet all the above requirements via intellectual property that it owns, and not rely exclusively on third-party solutions to meet these criteria.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to have a positive impact on revenue, retention and reputation. Ultimately, technology providers are judged on their ability and success in capitalizing on their vision. The Ability to Execute axis highlights the vendor positioning directly attributable to that vendor’s actions. While highly important, the product or service attribute is just one of the seven attributes Gartner evaluates to determine a vendor’s placement on the Y-axis of the Magic Quadrant.
Product or Service: Core goods and services offered by the technology provider that compete in/serve
the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, product quality, feature sets and skills, primarily offered natively as defined in the market definition. This is the evaluation of how well a vendor does in building the solution that the market wants and perceives as being worthy of new investments — ideally resulting in a three- to five-year strategy based on the vendor’s portfolio (versus tactical or point-product usage). For more on Gartner’s view about the elements of a solid, future-oriented strategy, see “The Future of Backup May Not Be Backup.”
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy and Organization): Viability includes an assessment
of the overall organization’s financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and especially the likelihood of the individual business unit to continue to invest in backup/recovery products, and to continue offering these products and advancing the state of the art within the organization’s overall portfolio of solutions.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The technology provider’s capabilities in all presales activities and the structure
that supports them. It includes deal management, pricing (acquisition, but especially maintenance) and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness and timeliness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability to respond to, change direction, be flexible and
achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customers’ needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also heavily considers the provider’s two-year history of responsiveness in meeting or being ahead of the market.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the
organization’s clear and differentiated message to resonate and influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This mind share and amount of buzz can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotions, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities. This directly leads to unaided awareness (Gartner end users mentioned the vendor without being prompted) and a vendor’s ability to be considered by the marketplace.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful
with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical or account support, as well as the perception of how accurate, effective and timely this support is. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and their quality), availability of user groups, service-level agreements, etc.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of
the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis (see Table 1).
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Product/Service high
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization) standard Sales Execution/Pricing high Market Responsiveness and Track Record high
Marketing Execution high
Customer Experience high
Operations low
Completeness of Vision
This evaluation is based on the vendor’s ability to convincingly articulate its future product direction and demonstrate innovation in meeting customer needs, enabling the vendor to more-effectively compete in the market. The credibility of a vendor’s vision is weighed against its past ability to execute against previously stated plans. Market understanding should be the guiding factor in new product development to ensure that the engineered product meets customer needs. Managing the complexity of storage environments requires innovative approaches that will distinguish leaders and delight customers. Ultimately, technology providers are rated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunities for the provider. As such, the Completeness of Vision axis focuses on potential, and measures the vendor’s historical ability to deliver solutions in advance of widespread market demand.
A vendor with average vision will anticipate and respond to change by accurately perceiving market trends and exploiting technologies. However, a vendor with superior vision can anticipate, direct and initiate market trends. While highly important, the product attribute is just one of the attributes that Gartner evaluates to determine a vendor’s placement with respect to vision on the X-axis of the Magic Quadrant.
Market Understanding: The ability of the technology provider to understand buyers’ needs and translate
these needs into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen and
understand buyers’ wants and needs. The more visionary not only can observe, but also can enhance those wants with their added vision and potentially even shape or move the market in a new direction, or accelerate market activity and trends.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, highly differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout
the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs, public events and tradeshows and positioning statements. In a world where many vendors and products sound similar, it is vital to know what the message is, how the message is distributed, what vehicles are used to effectively communicate it, and how well the buying public resonates with and remembers that message.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling a product that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect
sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base. This also includes the ability for the sales team to effectively and clearly communicate the current capabilities along with the vision and road map, while also differentiating the offering(s) from the competition.
Offering (Product) Strategy: A technology provider’s approach to product development and delivery
that emphasizes differentiation, compelling functionality, ease of deployment and ongoing administration, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements. The offering needs to be capable of meeting the current and future tasks, but also must be configured and managed so that the capability of the product is easily exploited. The product should be extensible so that today’s investments can be leveraged in the future.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of a technology provider’s underlying business proposition. Vertical/Industry Strategy: The technology provider’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for
investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes. This includes the track record for innovation and current production exploitation of new capabilities, as well as the near-term (less than 12 months) upcoming feature set along with the longer-term road map.
Geographic Strategy: The technology provider’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of geographies outside the vendor’s “home” or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market (see Table 2).
Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Market Understanding high Marketing Strategy standard
Sales Strategy high
Offering (Product) Strategy high
Business Model low
Vertical/Industry Strategy low
Innovation high
Geographic Strategy standard Source: Gartner (June 2012)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They have the most comprehensive and scalable product portfolios. They have a proven track record of financial performance and established market presence. For vision, they are perceived as thought leaders, have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities, improving ease of use, and increasing their scalability and product breadth. A fundamental sea change is occurring in the recovery market. For vendors to have long-term success, they must plan to address the legacy requirements of traditional backup and recovery, while looking to expand their integration with and exploitation of snapshot and replication technologies. A cornerstone for Leaders is the ability to articulate how new requirements will be addressed as part of their vision for recovery management. As a group, Leaders can be expected to be considered part of most new purchase proposals, and have high success rates in winning new business. This does not mean, however, that a large market share alone is a primary indicator of a leader. Leaders are strategic vendors, well-positioned for the continued industry consolidation. The Leaders in this Magic Quadrant are CommVault, EMC, IBM and Symantec.
Challengers
Challengers can execute today, but have a more limited vision than Leaders, or have yet to fully bring to market, through product and marketing, their vision. They have capable products and can perform well for many enterprises. These vendors have the financial and market resources and capabilities to potentially become Leaders, but the important question is whether they understand the market trends and market requirements to succeed tomorrow. A Challenger may have a robust backup portfolio, but has not yet been able to expand its market share, or has been slower to articulate how it will address future requirements in
